James was by no means a mathematician, but it didn’t take an accountant to know that if you sold something for pennies that cost dollars, you weren’t exactly making a profit. It seemed to him that the real aim here was to make sure everyone had a good time and left the premises happy, and with a full stomach.
He insisted on putting five dollars into the coffee can for a ham-and-cheese sandwich whose price was set at fifty cents.
“The bread costs more than fifty cents,” he commented to Constance. She produced a napkin for him as she sipped on a diet soda she’d bought from the same stand. “Donations?” James guessed, nodding toward the swiftly dwindling food supply that had been more than ample when they’d begun.
“Yes.”
Something in her voice made him look at her. When he did, he had his answer. “You paid for all this, didn’t you?”
Constance didn’t answer immediately. Taking another sip, she smiled that same enigmatic smile she’d flashed at him earlier and replied, “Getting paid back more than I put in, James, more than I put in.”
And then, because of his skeptical look, she gestured around at the school yard. There seemed to be as many students on the premises now as there were during the week. That alone seemed incredible to him. And they seemed happy to be here.
“Just look at them, James. They’re having fun.” He tried to focus on what she was saying and not on the fact that she threaded her arms through his as she spoke. And caused his heart rate to speed up faster now than when he was building the stands. “Not joining up gangs or getting into trouble, they’re having good, clean fun,” she emphasized. “Being kids. Being exactly the age they’re supposed to be and not trying to impress some local tough guy so they can get into a gang.”
“And what are you?” he asked, brushing aside a strand of hair from her shoulder. “Their fairy godmother?”
Her eyes seemed to shine as she considered the thought. “Hey, if the wings fit…” And then her smile slipped into something a little more serious and he knew she was speaking from the heart. “No, I’m just the one who’s lucky enough to be here in order to try to help, to turn them around. Maybe to save a few of them from what they’d been raised to believe was inevitable. A destiny that would see them into an early grave.” She tossed her hair over her shoulder, tossing aside the somber mood as well. “Can’t think of a greater high than that.”
And then, after uttering the words, she pressed her lips together, her eyes on his.
He had a feeling something was coming. He just didn’t know what, or how to brace himself. He’d built everything she’d asked for, what else was there?
“Speaking of high—” He saw her eyes search his face. Was she trying to see if he was open for anything? Maybe he was at that, he thought, vaguely wondering if she’d slipped something into the sandwich’s so-called secret sauce. “I was wondering if I could get you to talk to my class about the dangers of drugs.”
The blow came out of the blue and he wasn’t prepared for it. It brought with it a suitcase full of emotions he hadn’t dealt with in a long time. Wasn’t prepared to deal with now.
His voice was flat as he said, “Your school already has a D.A.R.E. program.”
“Yes I know, but this would be personal for them.” Her voice took on momentum, like a spring breeze shaking magnolia blossoms off the trees. “Just my class. There are a couple of boys whose older brothers—”
Finished eating, he balled up his napkin and shoved it into his pocket. “No.”
He’d cut her off so sharply, so firmly, she almost felt as if she’d been physically pushed away. Rather than back off, the way she knew he expected her to, she kept her arms through his and tugged him aside until they were behind the school building.
“What did I say?” she asked him quietly.
“Your short-term memory giving you trouble?” He couldn’t help the sarcasm. Right now, it was all he could do to hold himself together. Memories of Tommy, of the way he’d found his brother in the bathroom they’d shared, came vividly rushing back to him. He struggled to shut them away.
“There was a look that came into your eyes just then, like you were wounded.” Because she’d seen that same look staring back at her from her mirror when her mother had finally passed away after a long illness, Constance made a guess. “Who died, James?” she asked.
His face hardened. He didn’t want her prying into his life like this. She had no right to stir things up, to make him remember things. To make him feel.
“Lots of people die,” he bit off coldly. “Every day.”
He made her think of a dog someone had taken a stick to, a mistreated animal that trusted no one. She wasn’t about to leave him in pain like that. “Who died that was close to you?”
“Why are you pushing your way into my life, Constance? Why do you have to know everything?”
“Not everything,” she said simply, “just what hurts you.”
He stared at her, unable to understand. His own parents had backed away from him, never taking the time to even know a single thing about him. He was nothing to the woman standing before him. Why was she so interested in him? “Are you for real?”
The smile was soft, coaxing. He felt some of his tension leaving even as he tried to make it stay, tried to use it as a barrier between them.
“The hospital that issued my birth certificate seems to think so. James, you need to talk about this, to purge whatever is tormenting you this way.”
“More than you?”
“More than me,” she replied, dead serious.
He blew out a breath and looked away from her. Looked back into the past. It had been, what, eleven years ago now? Damn, had that much time gone by? Where had it gone to? He couldn’t remember.
“My brother,” he finally said in response to her earlier question. “My brother died of a drug overdose.” His mouth felt dry as a bone. “I was the one who found him. On the bathroom floor. He had a smile on his face. Like he’d finally found an answer to all his problems.”
James paused, getting hold of himself. Aware that she was still holding his arm. Tethering him to this world she was trying to create. Where people were good and cared about one another. A world that didn’t exist, except in her mind.
“I didn’t see it coming. Maybe I didn’t want to see it coming.” He shrugged carelessly. Lost. “Whatever excuse I fed myself, I didn’t stop him. Didn’t save him.”
He sounded so alone. She wanted to hold him, to make his pain go away. “We can’t save everyone,” she told him softly.
He was incredulous as her words penetrated his pain. “That’s funny, coming from you. You can’t leave anything alone.”
She lifted one slender shoulder, then let it drop. “My mother accused me once of being an overachiever. Maybe I am. I figure if I try hard enough, I’ll be able to get to a few.”
Which explained what she was doing as a teacher, but not what she was doing meddling in his life. Messing with his mind.
“So why are you crowding me?” he challenged. “Why aren’t you just running around, saving them?” He nodded toward the school yard. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not twelve and I’m not in any danger of joining some street gang.”
“No, you’re in danger of becoming part of a different kind of gang,” she pointed out, undeterred. “It’s the legion of the walking wounded. The walking dead.”
Dead, that was the best way to describe how he felt inside. He’d been dead for a very long time. Until she’d come along and started an exhumation process.
“Look, why don’t you try to save someone you can?”
Her eyes never left his face. “I am.”
He didn’t know whether to walk away from her as fast as he could or sweep her into his arms and kiss her, draining her of all the life-affirming essence she could spare.
He did neither. Before he could respond at all, two of her students materialized from around the corner. The taller of the two, a boy with skin as da
rk as a cup of hot cocoa, looked at his friend with a superior air. “See, I told you they went here.”
The other boy, smaller but wider, ignored his friend. Instead, his attention was centered on James. “Can you pitch?” he asked without any preamble.
Caught off guard, James replied truthfully, “Yeah.” He’d played a fair share of baseball while in high school. There was a time when he had even considered trying his hand at it professionally. Even on the third-string minors, he could have earned enough money to provide for Tommy and himself and gotten them the hell away from their parents. That had been his goal. Until that awful morning he’d found Tommy’s lifeless body.
“Good. Just the guy we’re looking for.” Without any further elaboration, the shorter of the two boys, Justin, took him by the arm and began to lead him to a stand that offered prizes for hitting the bull’s-eye three times with a softball.
James looked over his shoulder at Constance, who spread her hands wide.
“Don’t look at me,” she told him, a grin splitting her face, “I can’t pitch to save my life.”
He sincerely doubted that.
For once, neither his pager nor his cell phone went off the entire day. The one time James would have welcomed the interruption, there was none. His day off remained his day off. And he was forced to remain because every time he so much as thought of leaving, another one of Constance’s students would show up directly in his path with another entreaty, another question. Or just to hang in his shadow.
“I’m going to be a cop someday, too, you know. Like you. I thought I’d learn the moves now,” another one of the boys told him.
“It takes more than moves,” he told the boy, who looked at him with eyes that were older than they had a right to be.
“Yeah, I know.”
James was convinced that Constance had set some kind of a relay system in motion, with scouts watching him for any signs of retreat.
And so, something he’d set out only to devote an hour to, if that much, wound up stretching into an all-day affair.
He wanted to mind. But he didn’t.
The carnival was over by four. The school yard cleared out within a half hour after that, leaving a ghost town of empty stands as evidence of earlier activities.
James knew he should just slip away, now that the getting was good. But he found himself coming over to Constance. He had no other conclusion to draw except that he had to be a glutton for punishment. “I suppose you need help breaking all this down.”
She stopped surveying the area and looked at him. She was left with five volunteers. More willing hands would be better. And if they belonged to a strong, handsome police detective who sent her pulse into double time, so much the better.
“It would be nice.”
He wished she’d stop pushing him into a niche he didn’t fit into. “I don’t do ‘nice.’” Constance cocked her head, watching him intently. By now, he’d stopped pretending he could ignore her. “What are you doing?”
“Waiting for your nose to grow—” she slid her fingertip over it “—because that’s a lie and you know it. You do ‘nice’ very well.”
He knew the futility of arguing with her. He was a quick study. “Your influence, I suppose?”
She shook her head, not about to take the credit for something he’d already possessed. “No, you did it before I met you, otherwise, you would have never placed that ad in the newspaper about my cameo.” She fingered it, making sure it was still there. It was a habit she’d gotten into from the moment she’d put it on. “And then we would have never met.”
“Don’t make me get wistful.”
She laughed. He hadn’t even come close to sounding gruff. “Can’t fool me, Detective Munro. I see right through that bulletproof vest of yours.”
“Right, forgot you’re clairvoyant.” Good thing she wasn’t really a mind reader, because he could have gotten slapped for what he was thinking right now.
She was deadly serious in her protest. “Not clairvoyant, just able to see into your soul once in a while.”
He decided to challenge her. In his book, clairvoyants, even beautiful ones, were just another form of fortune tellers. He didn’t believe in either. “Okay, what’s the view like from there now?”
Her eyes held his for a moment and, had he been superstitious, he would have said that she really was delving into his mind. “You don’t want to like me, but you do.”
Her words took his breath away. Because they were dead on target. He decided to push her away, once and for all. For both their good. “Lust,” he corrected tersely, “the word is lust.”
If he meant to ruffle her or send her running, he failed miserably. “That’s in there, too. But not by itself.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He kept staring at her. Maybe she would respond to the truth. “Look, I’ve got nothing to offer. I couldn’t help the three people who meant something in my life. I wouldn’t admit to myself what was happening to Tommy until it was too late and as for my ex, she always said I loved my job better than I did her.” The shrug was indifferent. Helpless. Just the way he felt whenever these memories returned to him. Because he could do nothing to change either of the circumstances.
“Truth is,” he told Constance, saying something out loud that he had never even allowed himself to think before, “I was hiding out. I figured if I wasn’t around, I couldn’t screw up. But I did anyway.” His expression turned deadly serious. What did it take to make this woman back off? To send her running for the hills? Or at least away from him? “Is this the kind of person you want to get mixed up with?”
She could almost feel his pain. That was the curse of being too sensitive, of being able to pick up a vibration. It wasn’t just a clever nightclub routine on her part. It was true.
“You have your tenses confused, Detective. I already am ‘mixed up’ with you. Don’t worry, James,” she added quickly, “I won’t ask anything of you that you can’t deliver.”
The look on his face was dark. “You already have.”
“But you’ve delivered, so it doesn’t really count now, does it?”
She was light, he was dark. She was hopeful, he knew the world to be devoid of hope. He was better off letting her go.
“Look, Constance—”
Whatever words he was going to offer never made it to the starting gate. Anchoring her hands on either of his shoulders, Constance rose up on her toes to press her lips against his.
The kiss unraveled his thought process to the point that he lost all sense of direction. All sense of purpose except that he needed to savor this kiss if he was going to make it to the end of the day.
Her lips felt like warm honey, pouring into his veins. Soothing him at the same time that they somehow managed to set him on fire. It was a kiss he wanted to go on forever. But he knew it wouldn’t. That made him feel too vulnerable. And he couldn’t have that.
“Damn,” he murmured, still holding her in his arms, “but you argue dirty.”
The expression on her face told him that she had no regrets. “Best way to win. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a carnival to put to bed.”
He looked around and saw the same volunteers she did. “Doesn’t look like you have much help.”
She tried to make the best of it. “People don’t like signing up for the clean-up crew. There’s something exciting about putting it all together and something sad about dismantling it.” She raised her eyes to his and because she could sense what he was about to say, said it before him. “Kind of like a relationship, yes, I know.”
“You really are clairvoyant.”
She held up her thumb and forefinger, a space of an inch between them. “Just a little.”
Well, clairvoyant or not, she was still just one woman and there was a lot to do here. “I suppose you’d like help.”
She grinned. “You’ve got the sight, too.” And then she turned her eyes to his, disarming him completely. “I’d love it.”
As far as he knew, men and women were created with free will. His had been taken from him and placed in storage. At least as far as his dealings with her were concerned. With a sigh, he went to take apart the stand he’d built less than five hours ago.
James had meant to go home once everything was dismantled and put away. Again, he was guilty of miscalculation. If his batting average had boasted these numbers in his job, he would have been back patrolling a beat or looking for work outside the field.
But then, somewhere in the back of his mind, he’d known. Known that when everything had been packed away and the school yard once more returned to its former identity, he wouldn’t be going his own way. He’d be going hers.
“Where’s your car parked?” He looked around but didn’t see anything in the vicinity that he would have guessed belonged to her.
“In the parking garage near my apartment.” He looked at her and she elaborated further. “I caught a ride here.”
He scanned the yard; they were alone. “So, where is this ride of yours?”
“They went home,” she said quite simply, slipping her purse strap on her shoulder.
He wasn’t going to let himself get roped in immediately. He made her work for it. “How did you expect to get home?”
Her smile was pure innocence, and he found it utterly irresistible.
“I thought you might take me there.”
“You were that sure I was coming? That I’d stay?”
“Let’s just say I had a feeling.”
“And if I got a call and had to leave?”
“But you didn’t, did you?” And then, because he continued looking at her and he liked logic, she added, “There are still lots of cabs around here this time of the day.”
It wasn’t day, it was almost evening. Twilight was just around the corner. He frowned. “This isn’t Park Avenue and you’re not superwoman. Things happen to attractive women in this part of the city. Hell, they happen to downright ugly people, too.”
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